Thursday, August 13, 2009

Just another day!

It’s just another day in the life of two people you probably know. It’s been more than a year since the last thing you knew about them happened. What happened during this one year is anybody’s guess.

Now in the US, he’s 25, she’s a little older than 25. There was something strangely romantic about the fact that she was older. Both of them are early risers now. She wakes up at 6 and he at 7, both alone in their respective suburban apartments in two very distant cities.

He now works for a number crunching firm where he uses his past experience in India, to strategize and optimize diaper stocking at Wal-Marts across the US. He spends countless office-hours facebooking and very frequently twittering updates! He doesn’t particularly dislike his job but there something about his job that makes him want to go into-the-wild. Or may be write a book. Or at least join a business school!

She’s working in a software firm for a year now. She’s spending most of her office time watching trailers and TV series on you tube as she’s not really interested in what she’s doing and she is planning to quit. She’s been planning to quit since a year now!

They sort of still think about each other, sort of as in very often. He is thinking of their first meeting in the resort. She’s thinking about the first photograph they took together. He’s thinking of the first time he made her laugh her lungs out. She’s thinking about their labeled gross conversations they particularly enjoyed! But now, each time they think about talking to each other, they run into emptier spaces, they run into more silence!

He spends his evenings watching football and sometimes trying his hand at what was his dream sometime ago, quizzing. He goes around with people whose company is not what he would have wished for, but at least is better than being alone.

She spends her evenings watching reality shows and then clicking through the facebook albums of her close friends and friends she once knew. She looks at her friends posing with their husbands and babies! She feels a little jealous. At the same time she has a weird kind of sympathy for them. Life was never about just husband and kids, but she, like him, had no idea what it was about. She always had this number in her head though. It was 25. Now it probably is 27. That’s her I-want-to-settle-down age!

They often joked about having a bowl of cereal for dinner all there lives after getting married. After all they were such ‘lazy bums’ to cook anything for themselves!

He cooks his own dinner these days. He’s a master rice-cook now. He cooks rice measuring out cupfuls of it. A marked improvement from when he couldn’t operate the microwave and couldn’t tell Basmati and Sona Masuri apart!

She cooks her own dinner too. She now cooks great Rajma, Dal Makhni , Jeera Aloo and most importantly she now prepares fantabulous decoction coffee . Irony!

They don’t blame each other in their sleep anymore. For them , as someone said, if their is an antagonist of sorts, it is love itself - romantic love, which brought both of them out of their familiar worlds and then won't let them break free of its hold, normally the job of abductively inclined smugglers.

For them, successful relationship remains a story told, a film made; by others. They loved and lost and wept. Silently. But will they move on? Will tomorrow be any different? They doubt!